


furnace hearts

by HexJellyfish



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Snuggling, also implied blupjeans feelings? at least on barry's end?, girls kissing girls (hell yeah), lots of nonsense jargon, nonsexual touching, of both the magical and techno varieties
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-01
Updated: 2018-09-23
Packaged: 2019-05-31 14:19:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15121265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HexJellyfish/pseuds/HexJellyfish
Summary: It's the coldest Cycle of the Stolen Century, and it seems nothing can keep the chills out––except Lup, apparently. A series of potentially related short stories.





	1. coffee stains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> alt title: it is so goddamn cold, why are you wearing shorts
> 
> Lup seems to carry a cloud of heavenly heat with her wherever she goes. That's the only reason Lucretia wanders into Lup's quarters (read: it isn't).

 For the third time that afternoon, Lucretia set her pen down on the table to warm her hands.

She folded her bony fingers together and held them up to her lips, gently cupping the transient heat of her breath. Try as she might, she couldn’t keep that warmth contained; it slipped through the crevices in her grip like ribbons of sand, rising to the metal ceiling of her dorm to dissipate.

It was the thirty-fourth Cycle of their journey– almost three and a half decades since they’d left home to pierce the inky blackness of space. Each year, they turned the wheel of fortune, hoping for a plane with food, and water, and _people_ – Lucretia never thought she would long for city plazas with chaotic bustling crowds, but after a particularly hard streak of planes devoid of intelligent life, people ranked up there with oxygen. This year was no exception; they spun the wheel, they descended on the Material Plane, and they evaluated what would become their home for the next twelve months.

This planet was a plane of ice, and Lucretia hated it.

Within a few weeks of arriving here, Barry discovered a handful of arcane hotspots– gates to the elemental realm of Ice, through which endless gales of boreal wind peeled out into the Material Plane, chilling the world to its core. Only a handful of species learned to thrive– namely, a prolific breed of pine trees, and a pseudo-intelligent penguin-like creature that Magnus named “porguins”. Apparently, it was a reference to an old sci-fi scroll that Lucretia had never heard of.

At any rate, most of the crew found their places on this plane quite quickly. Taako and Magnus were mounting an ice-fishing expedition to find the Light of Creation, which statistics governed should have plunged somewhere into the frigid ocean that covered most of the plane. Merle found some enjoyment in attempting to teach the penguin-like creatures about taming nature; his plan was to have them proficient in Druidcraft by the end of the year. Barry and Davenport were working on linking the heating system on the Starblaster to the Bond engine, giving them theoretically limitless heat; based on the perpetually sniffling and shivering crew, Lucretia judged that they were having a hard time of it. Lup stuck around to jump-start the furnace; otherwise, Lucretia had no idea what the elf got up to. Lup was like all the best arts; easy to learn, but hard to master.

Lucretia had a little more trouble finding her routine. In the more populated planes, she could write for weeks and weeks on end without showing any signs of drying up, documenting plants and animals and niche magicks and the heroic escapades of her crewmates, _ad infinitum_. But in this plane– which she called “the Boreal” in her notes– she ran out of things to document within a month of arriving. She decided to keep writing in order to keep her fingers from turning blue and falling off; it wasn’t very effective.

Tentatively, she reached out to the pen on her table. The metal chassis, only missing the embrace of her hand for a moment now, was already cold. Her grazing touch sent a shiver careening up her arm and down her back; she jerked away, leaning back into her chair.

Her coffee cup was empty. That wouldn’t do.

The heavy hatch door of Lucretia’s room swung open slowly. Her head peeked out, looking down the hall both ways, followed shortly by her heavy wool sweater, red uniform pants, and finally her black loafers (her “Lucre-shoes”, according to Magnus). She wandered down the hallway towards the joint kitchen-living room space, empty coffee cup dangling in her hand.

As she approached the kitchen counter, Lucretia stole a glance at the ice-skinned lake through the frosty panes of the hull windows. The horizon was a brilliant white– fields of snow, patches of grey ice, and a pale blue sky. It was beautiful, in a painful way; Lucretia wondered if most beautiful things weren’t painful.

It took three absent presses of the button for Lucretia to realize that the coffee machine was broken. She sighed, suppressing a pout.

“Poor little guy– worked to death,” A voice called from over her shoulder. Lucretia, startled stone-still, watched Lup appear in her periphery, bringing with her a cloud of vibrant golden hair.

“I s’pose so,” She managed, stepping back from the counter. “…It’s so damn cold.”

“I’m glad you’re on journal duty, Creesh– I wouldn’t want sterling observations like those to be lost to time.” Lup’s little jab rolled right off Lucretia– she knew it was affectionate. She reached past Lucretia to tap her wand on the head of the coffee maker. Their arms brushed together in the process; Lucretia was startled by how _warm_ Lup was, even in the depths of planar winter. Lup paused in her motion, maintaining their touch.

“Is something wrong?” Lucretia asked.

Lup frowned, but the corners of her lips betrayed amusement. “Well, I transmuted the water in the coffee machine into hot coffee, and that part is fine– but now I don’t know how to get it _out_ of the coffee machine.”

A giggle bubbled up in Lucretia’s stomach, but she stomped it down with a well-practiced will. “You could… dip your cup in the reservoir? I suppose?”

Lup mimed thought with a careful finger on her chin; Lucretia continued to soak up the heat rolling off her skin in waves ( _her skin,_ she realized, _she’s not even wearing sleeves_ ). “No, I’ll just– I can just do this.”

Then she reached out and hoisted the coffee maker into her arms, turning it clumsily upside down over the kitchen counter. Coffee immediately began to stream down the machine in waves, migrating to the lowest corner of the angular metal body; to Lup’s credit, the coffee that didn’t end up on the kitchen floor _did_ come off the machine in a rather spout-like fashion. She filled two cups– a generic mug for Lucretia, and Lup’s favourite skull-shaped mug– before dropping the machine back on the counter.

Lup took her mug from the counter, ignoring the mess on the floor. “That’s _my_ exercise for this Cycle. Later, ‘gator.” Then she disappeared down the hall.

Lucretia, sourly aware of the cold that rushed into the Lup-shaped void, watched her go, then took up her own mug. A nagging voice in the back of her head urged her to handle the coffee spillage before coffee-smell haunted the kitchen (and that would make _three_ things haunting the kitchen if you counted liches, ha-ha, one point for Lucretia). A louder and colder voice– not crueler or more distant but physically, _viscerally frozen to the ass cold_ – demanded that she return to her room.

She obliged the latter voice, but only for a span of about twenty seconds. It took one glance at her desk (steel, haphazard, cluttered with loose sheets and reference journals), one sip of her coffee (already lukewarm), and the ghostly afterimage of Lup’s warmth against her arm to send her back into the hallway, wandering further down the hall and into the underbelly of the ship.

The bottom floor of the ship, the home of the furnace and the Bond engine, was a shade warmer than the rest of the ship. Even there, the steel seemed to soak up the heat and surrender it to the icy breath of the elements; it was as if fire was _less hot_ in this plane. Distantly, part of Lucretia worried that the cold might interfere with the ship’s propulsion, stranding them on this plane until the Hunger was looming overhead; that was the part of Lucretia that never stopped worrying, and she attacked it as quickly as she did her laughter in the kitchen. _Bonds aren’t heat,_ she decided, _so it shouldn’t be an issue. Although there are fallacies with that logic; what if the bonds don’t properly convert into heat? What if the heat breaks on contact with the air, preventing the ship from establishing lift, or–_

 Her thoughts were cut off by a wave of warmth. Sudden blissful relaxation touched her frost-burned muscles, and she pivoted towards the warmth without thinking, following (for once) the whim of her body. The cold awoke her survival instinct, and her survival instinct said _warmth equals life_ ; it’s by that logic that Lucretia found herself in the doorway of Lup’s room, a pair of lazy amber eyes tracking her own.

“…Hi.” Lucretia could find little else to say. She couldn’t exactly tell Lup that she’d followed the bread crumbs of her body heat– that was a line from a bargain bin romance novel (she would know, as she’d ghost-written dozens).

“If this is about the coffee thing, I did plan on cleaning that up,” Lup replied. She was reclined on her bed, a textbook on ward conjunction levitating over her head. “…Well, no I didn’t. Let’s not even front, am I right? I was gonna wait for Taako to come home and get his designer boots all full of sticky kitchen-floor coffee-stain goodness.” She flicked her wand, sending the book careening across the room and into a pile of disheveled magic tomes. Evidently this was her preferred reading position.

Lucretia cleared her throat. “No, it’s– it’s not about the coffee, actually.”

Lup sat up. “Then what’s hangin’, Hemingway?”

“I–“

“Do you need a model? A portrait? I’m good at portraits. Nudies, even, if you want.”

“No, I– _what?”_

“Nothin’. What’s up?” Her smile was as warm as her room, if somewhat wicked.

Lucretia pressed onwards. “Your room is the warmest in the entire ship, and I can barely feel my fingers. Do you mind if I–“

“Oh, is that all?” The wickedness drained from Lup’s expression, leaving only a beaming cheer. She picked up her wand again, summoning the book from the corner, which bobbed through the air back to its original position. She flopped back down on the bed again. “Be my guest.”

Lucretia nodded, stepping from the doorframe into the room proper and sitting gingerly on the comforter next to Lup. It felt like the whole bed had just spent an hour in a clothes dryer: heat travelled from Lucretia’s thighs up her back and––as she almost involuntarily slumped down next to Lup––to her neck. A devious part of her imagination wondered how warm it was under the covers, but that was a part she couldn’t entertain, because then the next logical step would be to consider Lup under the covers too, and then––

“I never get Abjuration magic,” Lup sighed.

“Sorry?”

“I mean, I get it like I can cast it, but I’m never any good at it. How do you do it, Creesh?” Lup dropped the book, which Lucretia now recognized as an Abjuration spellbook, on the bed and rolled over onto her side, propping herself up on her elbow.

“It’s… well, I suppose it’s a difference in philosophy,” Lucretia reasoned. “Abjuration is the art of keeping things out and tame. Wards, shields, counterspells and things. You’re good at Evocation––at forcing energy out and letting it loose, like wildfire. They’re incompatible, in a sense.” Lucretia’s interest in magic was negligible before joining the IPRE, but once it was obvious they weren’t going back home, she started to study new skills just like the rest of the crew. Unsurprisingly, Abjuration spells came very naturally to her––she’d been putting up walls her whole life.

Lup seemed to chew on the idea for a moment, and found it palatable. “Yeah, I think that dog can hunt. I was never any good at restraining myself––especially when I want something.”

“Is that so?” Lucretia pretended not to notice how Lup slid a little closer as she said those words. Her hand drummed nervously on her thigh. “Personally I’ve always had the opposite problem. I tend to prioritize what’s safe over what I want. I guess that’s why I’m so good at Abjuration.”

Lup smiled––it was warm, just like everything else about her––and let her hand snake onto Lucretia’s arm. Even through layers of clothing, she could make out each finger by the trail of warmth they blazed. Incredibly, she allowed herself to sidle closer to Lup; just as incredibly, Lup’s hand explored even further until it was resting on her stomach, her index finger drawing idle circles in the wool of her sweater. The under-the-covers voice was back, and this time it brought company.

 _Gods, how she wished Lup’s hand would sneak under her sweater_.

She conjured an imaginary bubble around that thought and sent it careening away.

_It wouldn’t even be sexual––just for the bliss of their skin meeting, and her heat spreading out like spilled coffee._

She created another bubble, sending the second thought after the first.

 _I mean, I guess it_ could _be sexual._

Lucretia was running out of imaginary bubbles and starting to panic. Lup was still looking at her, and her finger was still drawing circles, and suddenly it was hard to remember why she came down here in the first place––what she was doing, or what she wanted, although she knew what she wanted now. She tried to focus on Abjuration––restoring the barriers around herself, making more bubbles, putting up wards, protecting herself from that three-letter word that was starting to burn itself into the walls of her heart––

“Lup?” She said.

“Mhm?” Lup replied, gentle as a breath. Lucretia couldn’t stop her eyes from dancing nervously around Lup’s lips––rose pink and chewed to hell, which was charming for reasons she couldn’t name. She felt walls tumbling.

“Can… can I…?”

“Can you…?”

Lucretia squeaked something that sounded like “kiss”, and the rest died in her throat. Lup’s smile only grew wider.

“I’ll save you the trouble.” Then Lup’s body was leaned over her, and Lucretia could feel the rough texture of her bottom lip grazing her own. It was like the sun, coming out from behind the clouds: an almost religious swelling of the heart. For a moment, Lucretia forgot about how cold the year had been––in fact, she forgot what cold even felt like.

It took a moment for Lucretia to realize her eyes were closed, and that Lup had drawn away. She opened them; Lup’s face, still beaming, was waiting for her, and that was almost as good as the kiss.

“Better?” She offered.

“Better,” Lucretia said. She was smiling too; the rest of the Cycle didn’t seem so cold anymore.


	2. heart in a bottle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> alt title: explosions are warmer than not-explosions
> 
> Fed up with the incompetence of men, Lup takes the furnace problem into her own hands.

Lup, with the utmost regret, carefully removed herself from beneath Lucretia’s sleeping grasp. She reshuffled the blankets into a comfortable nest; Lucretia burrowed deeper, eyes parting ever-so-slightly as Lup’s heat escaped into the frigid air. If it were up to her, Lup would never leave––conjure food from the kitchen, harass Taako over her Stone of Farspeech, and snuggle with her chilly little human until they left this desolate icicle for good––but she was obliged to do a _little_ work, even if just to sate Davenport’s wrath.

Lucretia looked up at her from beneath her fortress of blankets, her eyes heavy with sleep. “Is everything okay?”

Lup nodded. “Peachy keen, mama. I just got ‘science officer’ stuff to do. I’ll be back soon, m’kay?” The blankets rustled in a way that suggested nodding. Lup smiled and leaned down to kiss her forehead.

In truth, there were a couple reasons for Lup to do her science work that Cycle. For one, Magnus and Taako retrieved the Light of Creation relatively early that year, meaning that they had a little more inspiration when it came to pushing the boundaries of their understanding; for another, Lucretia looked absolutely miserable whenever Lup wasn’t around to keep her from going all Han-Solo-carbonite-bath, and the boys weren’t pulling their weight _vis a vis_ fixing the stupid furnace. As usual, it was left to Lup to blow things up until the problem fixed itself.

She closed the door to her dorm and cast an extremely gentle form of the spell _Heat Metal_ on the walls, followed by some other cold-resisting wards. They wouldn’t last for long here––something about the portals to the Plane of Ice weakened spells like that––but they’d do until Lup could come back and heat ‘Creesh up the old-fashioned way.

When she arrived at the furnace, Barry was the only one around, staring daggers at the machinery. Lup could hardly blame him; nothing they had tried seemed to work, and the longer they went without heat, the more irritable the crew became. Ironically, the lack of heat was causing friction.

“What’s the news, Blues?” She said, sitting on a pipe next to him.

He took his glasses in hand and began to wipe them clean of grease. “No news. Never any news. I’d take bad news, at this point––it’d be better than nothing.”

“I don’t know about that––I’d prefer the Bond Engine be fussy than it blow us all into smithereens.”

 “ _Warm_ smithereens,” Barry said, with a hint of longing. Lup found that both endearing and slightly disturbing. She sighed, cracked her fingers, and kneeled in front of the Bond Engine, examining the set of relays Barry and Davenport built between it and the furnace.

“We know the problem is with the interface,” Barry began, “because the furnace runs fine off the excess heat from the propulsion, and the Bond Engine powers _that._ But for some reason, it doesn’t want to go directly into the furnace––it needs that middle step, even though the Bond Energy converts perfectly into heat when it’s lifting the ship. The problem is circular, and we don’t know how to break into the circle.” Lup nodded along to his lecture, even though she already guessed most of it. Barry seemed to forget that she helped stress-test the Bond Engine, way back on their home plane; she knew its limits just as well as the team who designed it––maybe a little better, even.

“I see your point,” She said. “We can’t exactly run the ship for the entire year; the propulsion isn’t designed for that kind of stress.” To her mild frustration, they hooked up the interface exactly how she would’ve done it, which meant it _should’ve_ worked––and yet, she had Lucretia curled up in her bed like a sick puppy, so it obviously didn’t. She leaned back from the machinery, twirling her wand in her hand absently.

Barry sighed, then surrendered a gloomy chuckle. “More than once now, I’ve thought about animating the furnace and giving it a piece of my mind, but I think that’d just cause more problems than it’d solve.”

Lup paused. “Animate.”

“…Yeah?”

“Oh, Barry, you fucking _moron,_ you’re a genius.” She stood up and twirled in one motion, then playfully punched Barry’s shoulder. “Don’t move,” She added. “I just need to grab some stuff!”

Then she disappeared into the ship, leaving him staring after her, looking flattered, confused, and frightened all at once.

#

It took a few hours of reading, modifying incantations, and drawing swirling magic circles full of runes and lines, but soon enough the furnace was at the center of a proper summoning circle. Surrounding it were three fearsome wizards: Barry, glasses fogged and fingers covered in white chalk dust; Lucretia, dressed in four sweaters and sniffling intermittently; and Lup, holding a tray of sulfur and phosphorous incense in one hand, and her favourite blow-things-up wand in the other. Of the three of them, only Lup seemed particularly enthused about her dope-ass plan.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Barry asked, for the fourth time since they began.

Again, Lup nodded. “Defo, my guy. It’s just _Conjure Minor Elemental,_ it’s baby stuff. I was doing third-level spells in high school.”

“That’s not the part that worries me,” He replied. “It’s more the ‘release a wild elemental in the belly of the ship’ part. The best thing about _Conjure_ spells is that they _disappear_ at the end––and we’re taking that part out. What if, once the normal duration ends, it goes berserk and blows up the furnace? Or––or what if it starts to multiply, or something? What if––”

“Hush, dear,” Lup insisted, putting a hand on his shoulder. “If ‘ands’ and ‘buts’ were coconuts, we’d all have a merry Candlenights.”

“What? What does that––”

“It means _, Barold_ , that you’re being a killjoy, and that excuses are cheap and grow on palm trees in some tropical regions.” Lup turned to Lucretia, who was examining the outer boundaries of their summoning circle. “How’s it look, babe? Up to the Lucretia Gold Standard of Abjuration?”

Lucretia rolled her eyes, then nodded. “Other than a couple weak points at the corners I had to reinforce, it’s solid.” Lup was tempted to lean in and kiss her cheek, but with Barry right behind her, she wondered if that was wise. Instead, she settled for an affectionate nose-boop.

“Radical,” She confirmed. Then she turned to the circle and levied her wand. “On three, I shoot a _Delayed Fireball Blast_ into the circle. Barry, you animate the ball into a Fire Elemental, and bind it to the furnace chamber. Lucretia, you bubble the Bond Engine, just in case something goes wrong and we have to fight. Ready?” Both of her companions nodded, and Lup felt excitement start to thrum in her veins, eager to race out into the world.

“One. Two. _Three!”_

A concentrated bead of sweltering heat blossomed from the end of Lup’s wand, then darted into the center of the magic circle, just as Lucretia’s bubble formed around the smooth chassis of the Bond Engine. Barry’s hand twitched, and ribbons of blue energy tied themselves around the flaming bead, molding and shaping it as it struggled to expand outwards.

Then the incense in Lup’s hand exploded, and things went wrong.

As her concentration broke, Lup’s fireball began to expand more rapidly, snapping the hold of the blue ribbons on its form. Barry tried again to corral it, but this time the ribbons couldn’t even approach before being burned away by licks of flame.

Lup pulled herself back together, raising her wand to the fireball again: she knew the growth was outside her control now, but there had to be _something_ she could do. She could try _Ray of Frost,_ but it might break the circle and let the fire escape into the ship; she could try to _Banish_ the fireball, but it wasn’t exactly animated yet, so it probably wouldn’t go anywhere. Silently, she scolded herself for trying such a stupid idea without testing it on something smaller. Why couldn’t she have waited? Why did she have to be so damned reckless?

In the end, it was Lucretia who jumped to action. In one smooth action, she dismissed the bubble around the Bond Engine and instead formed a bubble around the fireball, trapping it inside.

“Barry,” She snapped. “You’ve got one more shot at animating this thing. Do it.”

He nodded and conjured the ribbons of blue light once more, wrapping them around the curvature of the bubble instead. The fireball struggled against its translucent prison, but it seemed to be losing.

Lup joined him, conjuring ribbons of her own and reinforcing his pattern, until her eyes landed on the Bond Engine. She threw down the burnt incense and used her free hand to channel the energy inside its turning arms; with one final pull, she yanked a thread of that intense white energy free and plunged it into the bubble, shoving the entire arcane mess into the heart of the furnace. The door slammed shut, seemingly of its own accord.

 Through the slats of the furnace door, they watched the bubble flash once, twice, three times; then the light dwindled down to a gentle flickering.

Lup collapsed against the wall, utterly exhausted; Barry followed suit, sitting on the floor and crossing his legs. Only Lucretia remained standing, peering down into the furnace at what they had created.

“From now on,” Barry panted, “we’re running your ideas by Davenport first.”

Lup nodded and grinned. “That’s probably for the best.” From across the room, she watched Lucretia idle near the furnace; she seemed to be thinking on something, as her eyes had that far-away quality she sometimes took on when she hit writer’s block. Lup thought about asking, but she knew that Luc liked to work things out herself––she probably wouldn’t have been much help anyway.

After a few quiet moments of contemplation, she tried anyway. “Lucy? All good?”

Lucretia nodded, a small smile tugging at her lips. “I guess you wouldn’t have noticed––you’re so warm anyway.” At first, Lup wasn’t sure what she meant, but Barry laughed and moved over to be closer to the furnace too, and it clicked––slowly but surely, the room was warming up.

Lup cheered and jumped to her feet, crossing the room and pulling both of them into a tight embrace. “We did it! Oh, the look on Davenport’s face is going to be _incredible_ when he finds out we fixed this without him! Lucretia, you gotta standby to draw that shit, it needs to go down in recorded history.”

She felt Lucretia laugh into her shoulder, and a different kind of heat spread through her chest. She let the two of them go; Barry, blushing up to his ears, excused himself to go do something in the lab, leaving the two of them alone in the furnace room.

Lup wrapped her arms around Lucretia’s waist and pulled her into a kiss. Lucretia returned it with equal fervor, and it felt like the last flare of bliss on a plane without gods. She let a hand float to Lucretia’s neck, where she traced circles under her jaw; Lup felt her sigh happily into her lips.

She pulled away to whisper in Lucretia’s ear. “You know, it was pretty fuckin’ _hot_ when you took charge back there.”

Lucretia smiled through a violent blush. “Oh?”

“Yeah––when you started directing Barry all bossy-like, I practically felt my knees buckle.” Lucretia closed her eyes and shoved her face into the crook of Lup’s neck, descending into a fit of giggles. Lup placed her chin gently on Lucretia’s head and listened to the hum of the furnace, feeling utterly content. She’d done some good work that day.

Distantly, from floors above, Magnus’s voice shouted triumphantly. “Hey, it’s warm in here! Taako, come sit in the living room, it’s so _warm!_ ”

**Author's Note:**

> come find me on tumblr @ arcane-arbys <3


End file.
